Of White Roses and Spider Lilies
by Spectrum51
Summary: And there those blooms are. Tim sees them as he sleeps and temporarily manages to escape from the nightmare that is being tortured by the Joker. And in that strange field of purest blossoms, he dreams. He dreams of speaking to a white-haired stranger and those strange alien blooms known as spider lilies. Crossover of Batman the Animated Series and Tokyo Ghoul.


Sleep is the only relief he can get from the constant torture. It's a comfort to his dying sanity as he relives moments of his past, the good moments with his surrogate family. Sometimes Tim will remember the night he ended up here, but more often he's filled with memories of his true self as Robin. He tries to cling onto the last thread of happiness inside him, but the memories always fade to nothingness and he's left with only a bleak unfortunate reality.

Today he's not taken to a memory. This time, he blacks out from the searing, numbing poison that courses through his feeble body and leaves him screaming until his throat is raw. But instead of a memory that should be long lost, he is taken to an empty white place. There is no sky, no memories, nothing, only whiteness ahead of him. And underneath, as Tim looks down through his domino mask there is something before him. Something before him as he is kneeling before this unknown force preying on his mind(not Joker, whose evil lies in reality) there are white roses dotting a ground without grass. The soft petals flutter against his face.

He tries to get up, but there are chains wrapped around his wrists and ankles, binding him. Still helpless, even in his dreams. The tightness of the rough, rusty chains cut through his black gloves and into his skin, digging into his helpless arms. The fact that he can't get relief, that he's a prisoner of his own in his dreams... that's what sends the choke of agony through Tim's throat. He lets out a quiet sob, hiccuping as a tear courses through the eyehole of his domino mask. Tim recoils as he realizes - from the familiar coppery scent that sifts through the air in this strange state - it is blood oozing from his eyes, and not tears.

The blood trickles against his face, leaving a sticky red streak against it. It drops against a white rose, smearing the once pure blossom. The rose twists and changes into the bold red of a spider lily, this now impure blossom a sole drop of crimson in a field of blankness.

"Beautiful, aren't they?" He looks up from his kneeling position and sees a man. His hair is white as the roses spread out beneath them. His eyes are a dull gray, and he is dressed mainly in black. The color of mourning. Tim squints at the stranger, trying to separate his cloud colored hair from the rest of this place. It flutters, rippling and swaying in the breeze. As the man advances closer to him, he notices that his nails are blackened- not by polish, but it looks strangely… natural.

"What?" Tim croaks, and he is surprised that he is able to even speak properly here.

"The flowers." The man kneels down, thumbing a pale rose underneath his grasp. "The roses." He stops and pauses to take a glance at that red spider lily, saying nothing.

"Who… who are you?" Tim says. It's hard to get the words out, now that he can talk in this strange dream of his. "What are you doing here?" And indeed, what is this white-haired stranger whom he has never met doing here in a dream? Sure, he could be an illusion, but he seems far too strong willed to just be part of an illusion his mind has created. It would all be too lavish.

"Kaneki," he says. His voice is flat and deepened to a scratchy, drab voice, as dull as his eyes. "What is your name?"

"My name is Tim." It's a bit easier for him to talk now. Kaneki. That name seems alien, unlike any of the names he has ever heard before. It does not ring of any familiarity, and as Tim sifts through the shards of his half-broken mind he finds no one named Kaneki. But if he does not know this man, then what is he doing here? "I've never met you before."

"Neither have I." Kaneki nods.

"Then what is this place?"

"This is a place I have visited many times before. It's… well, I don't know what I could call this but it's a place where I've been before several times, Tim."

"Yes, but who are you?" As a person. Who is this stranger in this flitting ghost of a dream? Kaneki looks down at the roses strewn across the ground, and then at the singular red spider lily again. It is there, a blemish amongst the perfection.

"Why are you staring at the flowers?" Tim asks. His voice is brewing with impatience at Kaneki's refusal to answer his question.

"These flowers are the same ones I saw…" his voice trails off and while, for the first time since he has appeared here, Kaneki has some raw emotion in his voice. Sadness on remembering.

"The ones here?" Tim gestures to the pure blooms surrounding the two, the petals strewn against the air and fluttering all around this place.

"Yes." Kaneki stands at attention and adds, "It looks like I'll have to tell you more about the truth.

"T-the truth?"

"Yes. Who I am, well who I used to be." He says. He doesn't extend a hand but said, "You need to join hands with me in order to see my past."

"I can't. I'm chained up here." He is fixed with a stare.

"Just try. If you're strong enough, you can get out. I tried it and it worked." Carefully, Tim wrenches his wrists apart and winces as his chains rip from their tight knots. Pieces of metal fly to the ground and melt away. He moves upward and the chains binding his ankles are finally gone at last. He walks forward, finally freed from bonds. With that, he grabs ahold of Kaneki's wrist and suddenly, the world seems to cave in around them.

"Wha-" His knees start shaking at the sudden movement and he holds tighter onto the older male's wrist until they stopped. They are no longer in that strange space, they are standing inside of a restaurant in front of a specific table and two guests there: One is a young man, around 18 or 19, with tidy black hair and eyes like Kaneki's, except his are rounder and warmer, with some brown mottled inside. The other is a beautiful young girl around the same age as the boy, with purple hair gathered in a loose ponytail, wearing a white dress that has a blue, long-sleeved shirt peeking underneath. The girl wears glasses, and as the boy chokes on his food, she leans closer to him.

"Are you alright?" Her voice is soft and sweet.

"I-I'm fine!" He lapses into a momentary panic as he finds himself accidentally staring at her chest. "Um… Miss Rize, you're not eating very much."

"Oh!" The girl known as Rize sinks back into her seat. "I'm on a… dietary regimen." With that, she excuses herself to the restroom, leaving the black haired boy staring after her.

"What does this have to do with anything?" Tim asks. With tight fingers, Kaneki grips his shoulder.

"Watch." The scene shifts again to the same black-haired boy running down an alleyway, muttering, "Nononononononono!" After him is the same Rize, except… she looks different. Her once tidy hair is swept free from its ponytail and she is chasing after him. Her eyes are horrifying: Black sclera with blood red irises and cracks running from the edges of her eyes onto her face. Her face is stretched with eerie monstrosity and there is blood smeared against part of her face. She chases after him, spearing his stomach with a strange, dark red tentacle like material floating behind her. Seeing that the male is not moving, she tilts her head with slight disappointment.

"Oh, you're dead already? Pity. You look delicious, just the right amount of fat…" Tim is swept with nausea as Rize raves on and on about how the boy tasted. What is this… cannibalism? Monsters? He would throw up here and now at this disgusting, immoral, and monstrous sight, but he isn't really here. That is something to be grateful for.

Pipes rip away from the construction site nearby and practically break from their bonds and fall atop Rize. She is crushed underneath them. "God…" she chokes out, "How could this…" A single eye, now back to its normal purple, rolls upwards through her head.

Now the two of them are in a hospital room, where the same black haired boy opens his eyes suddenly.. and his left eye (Or right to Tim) is just like Rize's eyes when she had been chasing after him.

"Ah!" He yells, backing away from the scene. "What.. what happened?" Kaneki makes no response but merely stares at the scene, as if he was reflecting on the past behavior of this boy. Momentarily, Kaneki squeezes his eyes shut and then snaps them open, red iris glaring down at the scene.

"You…" Tim chokes a little bit, taking a step away from Kaneki. "That's you?!"

"Yes. Rize was a ghoul, a kind of monster that can only eat humans. Everything else tasted disgusting to her. She tried to kill and eat me, and I survived. At the hospital, the doctor transplanted her organs into me as part of an experiment."

"But… that guy looked so different from you, Kaneki! How are you the same person!" That man was younger, a bit more carefree. His face wasn't as hollow, eyes had brown warmth, hair was black. Completely different from the man standing before him.

"Watch." Again, the scene melts away to a strange room with black and white tiled floors. In the center, Kaneki's black haired self is tied to a chair, hands wrapped behind the back of the chair, head staring down. From an unseen entrance a bulky, loudly dressed man appears, wearing brass knuckle rings that stretch across his fingers. It's not his queer taste in clothing that frightens Tim (but for how well they fit, he knows that Bruce is, always has been, and always will be the better dresser.) but it's the white mask stretched across his face that makes him look like Jason from Friday the 13th.

The man cracks his knuckles, a snap emitting from his finger as he cracks it beneath his thumb. The prisoner screams in pain as one of his toes is ripped away from his foot by a pair of pliers. Blood oozes from the pliers and Jason (what Tim has nicknamed him) holds up a centipede next to his ear. Tears are leaking from Kaneki's tired eyes now widened with fright, and the poor boy screams for mercy not to have the centipede placed inside him.

The scene shifts a final time to the same white place where Kaneki and Tim first met, and there he is sitting in the same chair, before Rize. She is beautiful once more, but her hair is loose and she wears no glasses. There are white roses in this place, but there are a few spider lilies twisting from the pure, fragrant blooms.

"And you'll change your ways to become stronger? So no one will question your place here?" She smirks as she tucks a stray lock of hair behind her ear.

"Yes." Kaneki's voice is a raw whisper, raspy from so much screaming outside of this place.

"And you'll do it to protect?"

"Yes." With that, Kaneki manages to leap free from his bonds, pinning Rize down to the ground. Tim is confused, wondering if he will kiss her, and why he would kiss a girl who is the cause of so much misery. Kaneki leans down to her shoulder and takes a bite as Rize says, "Eat."

He leans up again, and his black hair that was once struck with white and has been so gradually paling, finally the white that Kaneki's current hair is. The blood stretches from his fingers and mouth as he grasps his face and it streaks down his arms.

"I am… a ghoul."

* * *

"So… you were tortured, your hair turns white, and now you're here?"

"In short." The two are now in the same place that they were before. "There is much more as to why and what has happened in between, but I would prefer not to talk of that." His eyes travel down to the flowers once more, and there is the bold spider lily that dares to stand out from the roses.

"Why are you constantly staring down at the flowers? I get that they're pretty, but I didn't think you were interested in that kind of stuff." Even Tim is surprised that some of his snarky, confident humor has leaked through such humiliation and pain.

"It's not because I like flowers… it's because of the meaning," Kaneki says. "A long time ago, my mother was the one who told me the meaning of flowers."

"What do you mean?"

"The white roses mean innocence and silence. She loved them. Used to keep them all around the house," Kaneki says. "She also used to say that it's better to be hurt than to hurt others, but that's a lie. I can't understand why I never saw that, if I had I wouldn't have been so… weak." He spits against the ground and glowers down at the flowers.

"What does the spider lily mean?"

"Lost memories and abandonment." Kaneki abandoned and trashed his previous morals, and left his past behind from what Tim has seen before. He knows now why these flowers are here… it's because he used to be innocent and this pain used to be silent and gone in his past. He had no idea of the pain that he would go through now. And that singular spider lily… does it mean he will leave behind his previous self and change… or worse, have to leave the moniker of Robin?

A cry rips through his throat as he back away from the spider lily and rips it out of the ground, fingers shaking through his gloves.

"But.. this means… that… I don't want to change!" he yells. Kaneki moves closer to him, ignoring his cries of protest against the possibility of having to change and wraps his arms around him in a hug. Strange to have a person he barely knows embrace him as if they were old friends.

"I'm not going to say it will be okay, because there is always the chance that you will change for the worse and not change for the better. But sometimes you do have to accept the fact that things will change, and the best you can do is fight against it."

"Instead of being one who gets hurt you become someone who hurts others."

"Humans. Ghouls. Everything. If we want to live, to survive, we must adapt to change."

"But instead of being one who hurts others, or gets hurt, I'm the one who helps others and prevents them from getting hurt." Kaneki moves away from the embrace, curious.

"What is it that made you this way? What?" Tim looks up and says, "You'll have to hold my hand to see like we did before." With that, Kaneki's fingers close around Tim's smaller hand and the two leave from the field of flowers. It's a familiar, strange trip, but it no longer makes Tim nauseous since it is routine. Perhaps if his rigorous torture is routine, it will not hurt so much?

No. Because it's supposed to hurt, and it does.

Tim has never understood the phrase, "My life is flashing before my eyes." It is a phrase that has never made sense to him, a confusing euphemism. But now, he thinks he understands what it truly means.

Scenes trapped in the back of his mind resurface as he lives through all of them at lightning speed: Arguing with his father- not Bruce, but his real father- as they talk of Batman and how he shouldn't look up to him, finally stumbling across his hero, donning the Robin suit for the first time, swooping across buildings, watching Annie dissolve into Clayface… so many fleeting memories that he wants to relive, enjoying them all time by time. Tim craves the past now, before the white roses slowly decayed into spider lilies. Then comes a memory he never wants to see again.

He's fighting against two thugs, staring down at them smugly and thinking that he's rescued this innocent victim of a girl from harm. Triumphant, deceived, fooled. Then comes a familiar outfit of scarlet and black, cackling as she brings down a large mallet against his head. He groans, fading into unconsciousness.

"You're Robin… the sidekick of Batman in Gotham City. You were kidnapped by Harley Quinn, accomplice of the Joker and…"

"What is it?"

"You're… you're like me." They are standing once again in that field of flowers. And again, Tim is hit with that crashing realization that he will never be the same. His tears, still blood, drip down onto the flowers as he's gasping for air through his crying and yelping against this. He collapses against the flowers as his tears rub off against the roses and again they are turning into spider lilies. And he is ripping them from the ground and crushing them because he does not want to be reminded of this unavoidable future.

Kaneki does nothing but again, Tim is drawn into his embrace and buries his head against the black clad shoulder. It feels good, good to know that there is someone to comfort him. And suddenly, Kaneki is there like an older brother, rocking the smaller boy back and forth as he cries against his shoulder. He does not make a point to soothe Tim, because he knows that saying things like, "It's going to be okay" and "Things will turn out alright in the end" will just make it worse because those are all lies he does not want to retell. He makes no movements, he thinks that this change may take a turn for the worse, both of them do.

But as he comforts the smaller boy, Kaneki seems to be staring off into the distance at the endless white silence. As if he is trying to figure out what to do. At last his face collapses back into its more comfortable, emotionless expression as he pets Tim's hair. He hates it, being so helpless to do anything for this child, to be unable to do anything since he is so far away from the United States.

Is there a chance? Perhaps….

Tim stops crying, but it feels good to be leaning against this boy, this boy who is calming him down and helping his worries of change subside. He does not care about anything now, it has been one of the strangest dreams of his life, and he doesn't want this to end. He moves away and peels his mask off, finally revealing his true face. It feels good not to have to hide anymore, it feels good to finally reveal himself even if this is just a dream. Because he knows that Kaneki will not tell anyone, he can feel it.

And then… suddenly… it's all slipping away…

No!

He tries to hold onto this dream, to stay away from reality. But control is slipping away from his grasp, away.

Tim awakens to a dark room, bottles with evil chemicals lurking against shelves, a dormant electricity generating machine next to him. He stares up at the ceiling.

This is…

Reality.

* * *

 **Welp, here I am back with one of the longest oneshots I have ever written! I know that I've been inactive, but the reason is at one point I thought of quitting fan fiction because my stories were so bad. Okay, recently they've started to get a little less cringey, but here y'all are with a long enough story! This is a crossover between Batman the Animated Series and Tokyo Ghoul (as the category says). If you want an explanation about how Kaneki ended up in Robin's mind while he's getting tortured in Return of the Joker- where this takes place, should have said that earlier- even I, the author am stumped with how to explain it. I guess you could call it that they're stuck in some sort of special, supernatural mind meld.**

 **Yeah, dumb. But honestly, I'm not too sure how to explain this.**

 **By the way, the meaning behind those white roses and spider lilies ARE based on a Japanese custom called Hanakotoba. I saw these specific flowers in TG, and decided to look up some more about them since they seemed to have a hidden meaning in the show. I really enjoyed writing this, and I hope you enjoyed reading this! See you in the next story!**


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